Congratulations on your new job. Managing a bad bank may sound like it is something of a poisoned chalice, not least because the better you do your job, the quicker you will make yourself redundant. But it is not necessarily a career cul-de-sac.

In this regard, it is probably best to concentrate on the example of Citigroup’s Mike Corbat. He, as you know, used to run Citi Holdings – set up to wind down the things that the US bank wanted shot of following the credit crunch – and is now the group chief executive.

It is probably best not to think too much about UBS’s Carsten Kengeter, who, like you, had been co-head of the investment bank, but was then asked (told?) to run the non-core unit in October 2012 and was gone within six months.

You have probably already started phoning a few of the people who have run bad banks to ask for tips. There’s plenty of experience out there.

When you guys over at Barclays decided to shove £115 billion of assets into your “non-core” unit this month, it took the cumulative balance sheet of all the state-backed and privately held bad banks set up in Europe since 2008 through the $2.5 trillion mark, by my calculations. That makes Europe’s notional bad bank bigger than JP Morgan, which had a balance sheet of just over $2.4 trillion at the end of last year.

The early movers on this were your UK rivals. Stephen Hester set up a non-core unit that initially housed £258 billion of assets when he took over as chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland in 2008. He would definitely be worth a call (not least because, now that he’s running a boring old insurer, he’ll probably be keen to trade a few banking war stories).

Lloyds hived off a massive £300 billion non-core portfolio in 2009, much of which it inherited from its hasty purchase of HBOS. Commerzbank, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and Intesa Sanpaolo have all done similar things. Bad banking is becoming an industry in its own right and there is, in short, loads of knowledge out there for you to tap. To save you a bit of time I’ve spoken to a few people who’ve worked at bad banks and jotted down some thoughts.

Staff motivation: This is going to be your biggest challenge bar none. Every single member of staff you move to the non-core bank will be thinking the same thing: “I’ve been fired.”

They will also be thinking how they can turn a bad situation to their advantage. If you have put any whole business units into the bad bank, the staff will be trying to spin themselves out; traders will be trying to curry favour with prospective employers.

You will need to convince your bad bankers (do not call them this) that they are still a part of Barclays and, more importantly, figure out a compensation structure that is (a) sufficiently motivating, but (b) not so good that it annoys the guys still in the core bank and with whom you will have to work very closely.

Change the mindset: Being a banker is simple: you get paid to make money. Being a bad banker is a little more complicated: you are basically getting paid to not lose as much money as the bank might otherwise have lost. That involves treading a fine line between risk-weighted asset reduction and cost.

Normally, a good trade is one that makes your bank money. But not for you. Your good trades will be those that cost you less than the time-weighted cost of capital over the lifetime of the contract you’re getting rid of. Get used to spending, not making money.

Risk profile: The immediate temptation will be to dial the risk right back and hedge everything. But that will be very expensive and thus totally impractical. So you will have to decide what your risk tolerance is and monitor it carefully.

Your background in fixed income trading will come in very useful here. But you are going to need to become conversant with the various regulatory rules on capital to a degree you scarcely believed possible – you’re basically going to be dreaming about Basel III for the foreseeable future.

Asset disposal: Ideally, you will sell assets. This will free up capital and make you a bit of money on the side (though it is unlikely to be as much as you paid; the good stuff’s still in the core bank). This will be relatively easy for cash securities, especially as the markets are in pretty good shape at the moment.

But most of the assets that you are currently looking at as you scratch your head are derivatives, and derivatives have counterparties. This limits your options. You can go to your customers and ask them to unwind the trade. Some will (perhaps for a small consideration). But most either can’t or won’t.

The second best option will be to hand the contract over to another bank. However, this will mean that, in the words of one banker, you have “two mouths to feed”: both the client and the new bank will need to benefit from the trade.

Ultimately, if you are not prepared to spend money, you’re not going to be able to get out of trades. You might want to memorise this phrase for future use whenever your chief executive is asking why your non-core unit is still dragging down his bank’s return on equity.

The scraps: You should be able to unwind the vast majority of trading book assets in time. But there will be some you can’t: the clients might be unwilling to unwind or to change counterparties, the price disparity may be too big, the client may be a trust or special purpose vehicle and, thus, to all intents and purposes, there will be no one with whom you can negotiate.

You will have to hedge these trades and try to minimise the capital held against them as best you can. Then you will have to sit on them until maturity.

Which in some cases could be measured in decades. Maybe your role won’t be redundant so soon after all.